DARPA Grand Challenge

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held its third Grand Challenge competition on November 3, 2007.

The DARPA Urban Challenge features autonomous ground vehicles conducting simulated military supply missions in a mock urban area. Safe operation in traffic is essential to U.S. military plans to use autonomous ground vehicles to conduct important missions. (see more information)

Alternate Reality Game

Wired Magazine come up with a very interesting article about the alternate reality game (ARG) concept that emphasizes the one started at the Nine Inch Nails European Tour in Lisbon earlier this year.

Ecological Green Towers

Some years ago, Portugal made a candidature to organize the Americas's Cup 2009 in sailing.

The winner proposal was Valencia, so instead, a new project arise, in the place where should have been all the competition logistic infrastructure, with a Bionic Tower. The project didn´t go forward but it seems that others are considering even more ambitious related ideas in Moscow, Tokyo and Siberia.

Obidos, the Christmas Village

Obidos is a medieval walled village considered one of the seven wonders of Portugal.



They have a lot of christmas related initiatives until January 6th. Go there if you can, or else enjoy our little preview.

Visit Obidos Christmas Village official website.

Marry Christmas

AGOSTINHO DA SILVA

Agostinho da Silva is one of the most paradoxical portuguese thinkers of the 20th century. The most pervasive theme of his work was portuguese language culture, in a fraternal hug to Brasil and the other portuguese language countries. Yet, to him the national philosophies question is not a decisive one, it seems rather an academic question: "I don't know if there are national philosophies, and i don't know if philosophers, exactly because they think about the general, do not internationalize themselfs "

The problem from which he starts is the search for a justification to Portugal: "what i want is that our philosophy emanate from portuguese people, and makes that portuguese people have more confidence in himself" understanding by 'portuguese people' not only the portuguese from Portugal, but also from Brazil, native indians and blacks included, from Africa, tribals and blacks, and also from India, Macau and Timor.

In an universal vision that denies justification to the portuguese that live only to Portugal, he present himself to his readers as a fifth empire knight, a holy spirit kingdom, a labor more adequate to cigarras than to ants as is characteristic from children: "Restoring the child in us and crown him emperor, that's the first step to build the empire", which is the same that saying that the first step from empires is always in man's spirit, able to serve, like the former templarios knights.

An empire without the classic emperors, which take to the peoples of the world a philosophy that incorporate America's freedom, economic security from Soviet Union, and materialist renounce from East, but also a philosophy that the three can correct, extracting the first of imperialisms, the second of bureaucracy and the third from dogmas.

Is this a philosophy that, as he liked to say, does not start immediately from a reflexion about exact sciences, as in Descartes or Leibniz, but from faith, as in Espinoza. Starting from believes as a vital point and take that the word believe seems to have the same origin as the word heart, doing like the Infant, opening to the science from his pilots, astronomers and mathematicians. Everything said and defended with the tranquility from someone who knows that until today nobody reach the secrets of the world and because of that knows the limits of the positive solutions.

That way, it would be possible to value that which to him distinguishes the poortuguese people as a nation and as a culture: a nation and a culture capable of incorporating in himself "many impenetrable contradictions, until today, in rationalize from any philosophic thinking".

An empire from the future prevented and purged from the evils that ruin the former four, without charging pretensions, power and materialistic ambitions, without obligatory working, without prisons and social classes, without ideological and metaphysic crises. That was not the european empire anymore, from that Europe looking to more knowledge and power, and because of that exhausted as a model to the other 80% of mankind, less worried with power than with being.

Bring the world to europe, as in the past we bring europe to the world, that's the main mission to portuguese language culture, building his domain with a spiritual base and without a land one, because property slaves and only 'don't having' can turn us free.

Works

Sentido histórico das civilizações clássicas, 1929; A religião grega, 1930; Glosas, 1934; Sete cartas a um jovem filósofo, 1945; Diário de Alcestes, 1945; Moisés e outras páginas bíblicas, 1945; Reflexão, 1957; Um Fernando Pessoa, 1959; As aproximações, 1960; Educação de Portugal, 1989; Do Agostinho em torno do Pessoa; Dispersos, 1988.

Bibliography
António Quadros, Introdução à Filosofia da História, Lisboa, 1982.

Free translation from the InstitutoCamoes.pt article by Pedro Calafate.

Newton da Costa

Newton Carneiro Affonso da Costa (born on 16 September in 1929 in Curitiba, Brazil), Professor Emeritus, is a Brazilian mathematician, logician, and philosopher of international reputation. He studied engineering and mathematics at the Federal University of Paraná in Curitiba and the title of his 1961 Ph.D. Dissertation was Topological spaces and continuous functions. (more)

European Film Awards

EUROPEAN FILM 2007
4 LUNI, 3 SAPTAMINI SI 2 ZILE (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), Romania
directed by Cristian Mungiu
produced by Mobra Film SRL



EUROPEAN DIRECTOR 2007
Cristian Mungiu for 4 LUNI, 3 SAPTAMINI SI 2 ZILE

EUROPEAN ACTRESS 2007
Helen Mirren in THE QUEEN





EUROPEAN ACTOR 2007
Sasson Gabai in BIKUR HATIZMORET (The Band’s Visit)



EUROPEAN SCREENWRITER 2007
Fatih Akin for AUF DER ANDEREN SEITE (The Edge of Heaven)



EUROPEAN CINEMATOGRAPHER 2007
Frank Griebe for DAS PARFUM – DIE GESCHICHTE EINES MÖRDERS (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer)





EUROPEAN COMPOSER 2007
Alexandre Desplat for THE QUEEN

EUROPEAN DISCOVERY 2007
BIKUR HATIZMORET (The Band’s Visit) by Eran Kolirin, Israel

EUROPEAN FILM ACADEMY PRIX D’EXCELLENCE 2007
Uli Hanisch for Production Design DAS PARFUM – DIE GESCHICHTE EINES MÖRDERS

EUROPEAN FILM ACADEMY CRITICS AWARD 2007 - Prix FIPRESCI
COEURS by Alain Resnais

EUROPEAN FILM ACADEMY SHORT FILM 2007 – Prix UIP
ALUMBRAMIENTO by Eduardo Chapero-Jackson, Spain



PEOPLE’S CHOICE AWARD 2007 for Best European Film
LA SCONOSCIUTA by Giuseppe Tornatore



EUROPEAN FILM ACADEMY LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Jean-Luc Godard

EUROPEAN ACHIEVEMENT IN WORLD CINEMA 2007 – Prix Screen International
Michael Ballhaus

EUROPEAN FILM ACADEMY DOCUMENTARY 2007 –Prix ARTE
LE PAPIER NE PEUT PAS ENVELOPPER LA BRAISE
(Paper cannot Wrap up Embers)
by Rithy Panh, France

PRIX EURIMAGES
Margaret Ménégoz and Dr. Veit Heiduschka
HONORARY AWARD
presented by the European Film Academy on the occasion of the 20th European Film Awards
Manoel de Oliveira

Alan Turing

Being as i am interested in computers and mathematics i have to begin this 'on the shoulders of giants' series with one of the most prolific and influent thinkers of our time: Alan Turing. In this brief essay i'll try to explain how come he singled ed invented the computer, the modern conception of one, by his conceptual thought of the Universal Turing Machine, an abstract device that gived enough time and space could implement any algorithm. The Turing Machine came to be as the conceptual formulation of the modern computer and a powerful instrument in the study of the foundations of mathematics in the footsteps of The Entscheidungsproblem proposed by Hilbert.

When i say that Alan Turing invented the computer i'm not trying to imply that he is the only one who have contributed to the actual invention and construction of the modern computer, i'm only saying that his work on the Turing Machine is at the fundamental level of what is the modern conception of a computer and it would be enough starting from that to actually build one.

One of my heroes, Leibniz, was near achieving that goal, but he missed in linking all his ideas to a coherent and precise definition of a computer. In spite of that, lets not forget that he develop the pascal adding machine into a full calculating device.

Turing's work, besides all is implications in the development of the computer, was also a step further in the achievement reached by Kurt Godel in his famous incompleteness theorem, by stating the foundations of mathematics in terms of the halting problem, meaning that no turing machine could decide if all programs halt or not and consequently any system of formal logic is incomplete if coherent. More recently Gregory Chaitin stated the halting problem in terms of the probability that a program halts and reached the perturbant conclusion that even at a fundamental level of mathematics as in algebra there are mathematical facts that are unproven unless we take them has an axiom; they are uncompressable truths with maximum entropy or randomness.

The Entscheidungsproblem mentioned above, question whether there exists a definite method which, at least in principle, can be applied to a given proposition to decide whether that proposition is provable. Turing's great insight in his 1936 paper 'On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem' was to perceive Hilbert's question in terms not of proofs, but of computing numbers. As his title said, the Entscheidungsproblem was only an application of a new idea, that of computability.

His paper starts by asking how can we specify the infinite in finite terms? In particular, how can we specify the infinite sequence of digits in a 'real number', such as n = 3. 141592, 653...? What does it mean to say that there is a definite method for calculating such a number? Turing's answer lies in defining the concept of the Turing machine.

How Turing got his result? He use'd a version of Cantor's diagonal method from set theory. He first defined a turing machine as a device capable of a very simple set of operations gived by a 'table of behavior', each one being a specific turing machine, and in some state unequivocally gived by it's current configuration plus the symbol scanned on tape. (more details)Then he defines a computable number as an infinity sequence of symbols that can be printed on a turing machine starting with a blank tape. He then rationalizes that if we order all the turing machines in a sequence we can obtain a number that differs in the Nth digit of the Nth turing machine - the diagonal method - so it's uncomputable. But if it can be defined how is it uncomputable? The problem lies in knowing if a turing machine actually produce an infinite number; Turing prove that there is no turing machine which can be applied to another turing machine proving that it will ever produce an infinite number, so that the problem itself - know known as the halting problem - is not computable. Turing states that if there was such a machine it could be applied to itself raising a contradiction - another instance of the self referencing problem finded in Godel's proof and Russel's paradox. So the question of defining something to which that is no mechanical procedure to solve it can be easily translated to an abstract mathematical question and formal logic and therefore to give a negative answer to Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem.

The Universal Turing Machine

Besides given a definitive answer to the Entscheidungsproblem and defining the field of computability in new terms Turing's work had a practical implication: it laid out the principle of the computer through the concept of the universal Turing machine.

Given that there is a mechanical procedure capable of implementing any 'table of behaviour' in a Turing machine then there is also a more abstract one capable of implementing any Turing machine, what Turing called a Universal Turing Machine.

Today we can not but associate Turing original ideas with the concept of the modern computer. It's easy to correlate the universal Turing machine, a specific Turing machine and is configurations respectively with the computer, a computer program and the instruction blocks of a computer program. Turing also gave an algorithmic view of computation applied to the human mind which makes him also a prominent thinker in the philosophy of mind, because in spite of his pioneer work in the development of the concept of the computer, the subject of his study was the human brain as a start point from which would eventually emerge a computer.

Starting with Godel's proof of incompleteness and Alonzo Church lambda calculus we already had the answers to the questions Turing set to solve in his own work at the time he published his results, but the novel approach he devised was so ingenious and new that he achieved the conception and definition of the computer on paper before it would be physically implemented so that we might even say that he invented it.

World War II

The advent of the World War II had a profound impact in Turing´s live. Earlier, he developed an interest and some ideas about codes, cyphers and the global field of cryptanalysis. Armed with that skills he naturally achieve a position in UK effort to break German codes and their Enigma machine at Bletcheley Park. This also related with his previous experience in constructing computers: at Princeton he spent time in building a machine out of electromagnetic relays which effected binary multiplication as an encoding device, with some theory of immunity to cryptanalysis. When back at Cambridge, Turing also designed and partially built another machine, which approximated by gear-wheel motion a Fourier series for the Riemann zeta-function. It was intended to shorten the hard labor of finding the possible locations of zeros - the subject of the Riemann hypothesis, which remains today perhaps the most important unsolved problem in mathematics.



In Bletcheley Park he participated in the design of a machine called 'the Bombe' and had direct contact with the Colossus which was used in breaking the german Enigma successor, the Lorenz cipher. Due to the classified nature of his war effort to reengenering german ciphers and codes, that facet of his life was keeped secret until much after the war ended. But we can now recognize the great impact of that work simultaneous in the war outcome and to the evolution, use and recognition of the intrinsic advantages of electronic computers as a tool to solve problems.



Post War

Following his war experience, Turing went to the National Physical Laboratory and worked on his detailed design for a computer, submitting it for approval in March 1946. Turing's Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), as it was dubbed was chronologically second to the June 1945 EDVAC report bearing von Neumann's name, but in addition to the originality of its hardware design, it was ideologically independent: for (i) it was conceived from the outset as a universal machine for which arithmetic would be just one application, and (ii) Turing sketched a theory of programming, in which instructions could be manipulated as well as data, a foresight vision of the metaprograming approach.

This is also related with Turing later interest in machine intelligence and learning in the broad field of Artificial Intelligence. In Manchester, where he got his first full academic post, he and the small group around him published articles under the heading 'Digital computers applied to games' in 1953, which mark pioneering research into machine intelligence. But this lead made no impact on the fresh start to artificial intelligence made by Newell, Simon, Minsky and McCarthy in the United States. Nevertheless in his famous 1950 paper 'Computing machinery and intelligence' he presents the idea of an 'imitation game' also known as the Turing test, in which a human has to interact with 'someone' in a closer room through a teletype device and tell if it is a human. Turing says that if a machine can play the human role well, it can elude his human interactor in thinking his talking to a human rather a machine, then the machine must exhibit intelligence behavior, human intelligence. Turing predicts that by the final of 20th century we should be able to construct such a machine, a bold assumption that we are yet to achieve.

Nevertheless much of his other contributions to philosophy, logic, mathematics, and the emergent field of computation provided invaluable tools of thought that enable us to progress the state of civilization and maybe, in the proper time, the fulfillment of his vision about computers, intelligence and their expression in an artificial intelligence synthesis and in doing so perhaps we be able to know a little more about ourselfs and answer the primordial philosophical question about who we are.

An Inconvenient Truth

United Nations convention on climate change taking place in Bali, Indonesia featured former United States Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize winner All Gore as one of the invited orators.

From the site conference:

"The Conference, hosted by the Government of Indonesia, is taking place at the Bali International Convention Centre and brings together representatives of over 180 countries together with observers from intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, and the media. The two week period includes the sessions of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC, its subsidiary bodies as well as the Meeting of the Parties of the Kyoto Protocol. A ministerial segment in the second week will conclude the Conference.

What is needed is a breakthrough in the form of a roadmap for a future international agreement on enhanced global action to fight climate change in the period after 2012, the year the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol expires. The main goal of the Bali Conference is threefold: to launch negotiations on a climate change deal for the post-2012 period, to set the agenda for these negotiations and to reach agreement on when these negotiations will have to be concluded."

Lisbon Treaty

Today is the signature of the new European Union treaty in Lisbon at Jeronimos Monestery as a result of the Portuguese presidency mandate. To celebrate the event, the Lisbon Metropolitan Orchestra will perform a concert in Teatro Nacional de Sao Luiz. The program will include some works of great portuguese composers like João de Sousa Carvalho, Carlos Seixas, Francisco António d’Almeida, Marcos Portugal, João Domingos Bomtempo, Joly Braga Santos and Eurico Carrapatoso. (See more)

Rigoletto, Verdi

Portuguese Opera house Teatro Nacional de Sao Carlos just open is 2007/08 season with the performance of Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto (Synopsis).

Caixa Magica, the Portuguese Linux Distribution

Self explanatory... the title says it all. Visit their homepage (translated by google) at caixamagica.pt.

The Hermitage

Following an itinerant exposition from the Hermitage held in Palacio Nacional da Ajuda, Lisbon, here is some information about one of the most prestigious museums in the world.

From Wikipedia:

The State Hermitage Museum (Russian: Государственный Эрмитаж, Gosudarstvennyj Èrmitaž) in Saint Petersburg, Russia is one of the largest museums in the world, with 3 million works of art (not all on display at once), [1] and one of the oldest art galleries and museums of human history and culture in the world. The vast Hermitage collections are displayed in six buildings, the main one being the Winter Palace which used to be the official residence of the Russian Tsars. International branches of The Hermitage Museum are located in Amsterdam, London, Las Vegas and Ferrara (Italy). The Hermitage holds the Guinness World Record as the world's largest collection of paintings[2].

Strong points of the Hermitage collection of Western art include Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rubens, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Watteau, Tiepolo, Canaletto, Canova, Rodin, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, and Matisse. There are several more collections, however, including the Russian imperial regalia, an assortment of Fabergé jewellery, and the largest existing collection of ancient gold from Eastern Europe and Western Asia. (more)

Manoel de Oliveira/Oscar Niemeyer

Today, is the 99th birthday of portuguese cineaste Manoel de Oliveira and on December 15 is the 100th birthday of Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. Both of them are still in activity and provide a remarkable example of longevity in their profession. So i wish to take this opportunity to make a tribute to all that in spite of their age don't surrender to age or oldness and go on with their lives.

The Beatles

Something about The Beatles:

The famous rooftop last concert in Liverpool and...



...the cirque du soleil love show.

Top 5 TV Series

My favorite tv series. Enough said...

La Femme Nikita



Sherlock Holmes



Galactica



Northern Exposure



Due South

Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes is the famous baker street detective created by Arthur Conan Doyle who applies the logic reasoning as the method of deduction.

He is drived by the challenge imposed by the most strange and unique cases that come to him, the ones where his intellectual powers are most engaged and needed.

The devotion to his work his such that to him payment cames second to duty; he can pass days or weeks in a frenzy activity until he reaches his goal which he does; a good example of work ethic that help him reach new levels to his profession.

Although he's not a social inclined person, by his activity he has a profound influence in the lives of the persons that come to him for help in the matters that troubled them. He also plays a philanthropic role in some causes that come to his attention although he doesn't speak of them much.

He's a man of action rather than words, but he can be a good company, specially with his friend and confident Dr. Watson.

He's well fluent in the subjects that interest him and are indispensable to his work, such as chemics, and not quite so to the ones that are superfluous. But he has a taste for art, specially music and his loved violin.

So this is Sherlock Holmes, world's famous detective, someone that can be trusted and relied upon, friend of his friend and a positive influence on society. What more can be asked?



See also: Project Gutenberg

Sci Digest

A web science review edition. Open here.

Daily Galaxy

Some great articles published in dailygalaxy available at scribd.

Stephen Maturin

Stephen Maturin is a fictional character in the Aubrey/Maturin series of novels by Patrick O'Brian. He is a physician at the service of the Royal Navy, and also a naturalist by vocation; besides that he likes to play violin. He also serve as a spy during the Napoleonic wars.

He may be considered as a prototype of the modern man; a sub product of the renascence and enlightenment times of our era. He was a scientist as a physician and a naturalist, with a great commitment to knowledge improvement, and dedicated to the liberal arts via the music.

In the Master and Commander movie we can see all this psychological traces of his character as a general practitioner at his post as a physician of the ship commanded by his friend Nick Aubrey, when he explores the Galapagos and methodically dissect and classify the species that he can come a board and even discover some new ones, and when he plays the violin with Nick.

That's how i see humanity at the culminate of our state of civilization: mankind devoted to the pursue of knowledge with respect with their environment and a sensible soul to the art: sneaking into doors opened by the ancient Greeks.

Jules Verne

Jules Gabriel Verne (February 8, 1828–March 24, 1905) was a French author who pioneered the science-fiction genre. He is best known for novels such as Journey To The Center Of The Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Verne wrote about space, air, and underwater travel before air travel and practical submarines were invented, and before practical means of space travel had been devised. He is the third most translated author in the world, according to Index Translationum. Some of his books have been made into films. Verne, along with Hugo Gernsback and H. G. Wells, is often popularly referred to as the "Father of Science Fiction". (more)



See also : Museum
Project Gutenberg

Pi, The Movie

The film is about a mathematical genius, Maximillian Cohen, who narrates much of the movie. Max, a number theorist, theorizes that everything in nature can be understood through numbers, and that if you graph the numbers properly patterns will emerge. He is working on finding patterns within the stock market, using its billions upon billions of variables as his data set with the assistance of his homemade supercomputer, Euclid. (more)



See IMDb profile

The Camel

Here´s a 1975 hit from British band The Camel with Snow Goose. Progressive rock style with a Pink Floyd flavor.

Get this widget | Track details | eSnips Social DNA

Tale of Tales, a Short Film by Yuriy Norshteyn

Tale of Tales, like Tarkovsky's Mirror, attempts to structure itself like a human memory. Memories are not recalled in neat chronological order; instead, they are recalled by the association of one thing with another, which means that any attempt to put memory on film cannot be told like a conventional narrative. The film is thus made up of a series of related sequences whose scenes are interspersed between each other. One of the primary themes involves war, with particular emphasis on the enormous losses the Soviet Union suffered on the Eastern Front during World War II. Several recurring characters and their interactions make up a large part of the film, such as the poet, the little girl and the bull, the little boy and the crows, the dancers and the soldiers, and especially the little grey wolf (Russian: се́ренький волчо́к, syeryenkiy volchok). Another symbol connecting nearly all of these different themes are green apples (which may symbolize life, hope, or potential).

Yuriy Norshteyn wrote in Iskusstvo Kino magazine that the film is "about simple concepts that give you the strength to live."



See: Wikipedia

A New TOE Speaking E8

According to a new proposal by American physicist Gerret Lisi the above equations may be the answer to the ultimate theory in Physics, the unification between quantum field theory and general relativity or Theory of Everything, as is most commonly known.

Here's the abstract from the arxiv.org paper by Gerrett Lisi:

All fields of the standard model and gravity are unified as an E8 principal bundle connection. A non-compact real form of the E8 Lie algebra has G2 and F4 subalgebras which break down to strong su(3), electroweak su(2) x u(1), gravitational so(3,1), the frame-Higgs, and three generations of fermions related by triality. The interactions and dynamics of these 1-form and Grassmann valued parts of an E8 superconnection are described by the curvature and action over a four dimensional base manifold.

Conan, the Barbarian

I was not kidding when i told that this blog was about me. So now i want to talk about my favorite fiction characters: Conan, the barbarian, Sherlock Holmes, and Stephen Maturin.

I start with Conan and let Holmes and Maturin for later.

Conan was a character ceated by Ron Howard in the 30's; it made his first appearence in the December 1932 edition of Weird Tales magazine.

He was a barbarian from Cimmeria in a pre-historic barbaric forgotten world. A world where justice lay in the edge of a sword, everyone by himself; almost as today...

Conan was a nomadic wandering adventure; leaving Cimmeria at about the age of 15 he took the world as his home and made himself a king.

He guide his actions by a strict code of conduct; althought he was a mercenary who sold his sword he was also capable of the most altruistic actions and a loyal compagnion. Someone who keep his word.

That's him, Conan of Cimmeria, as i saw him in my teenage years.

The Mathematical Art of MC Escher

In 1956 the Dutch graphic artist Maurits Cornelis
Escher (1898–1972) made an unusual lithograph
with the title Prentententoonstelling. It shows a young
man standing in an exhibition gallery, viewing a print
of a Mediterranean seaport. As his eyes follow the
quayside buildings shown on the print from left to
right and then down, he discovers among them the
very same gallery in which he is standing. A circular
white patch in the middle of the lithograph contains
Escher’s monogram and signature.
What is the mathematics behind Prentententoonstelling?
Is there a more satisfactory way of filling
in the central white hole? We shall see that the
lithograph can be viewed as drawn on a certain elliptic
curve over the field of complex numbers and
deduce that an idealized version of the picture repeats
itself in the middle. More precisely, it contains
a copy of itself, rotated clockwise by
157.6255960832. . . degrees and scaled down by a
factor of 22.5836845286. . . .

Read more at ams.org

Stephanie - Ouragan

Her highness Princess Stephanie du Monaco at her 80's incursion in pop realms here with Ouragan.

GNU Free Essay

Richard Stallman. He started it all; Linux, Open Source, Free Software, all this has roots in his vision about software, freedom and user rights. It's all in the first chapter of his selected essays about the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation.

At the same time, when he was changing the world, and for the better, he do it at his own expense with the help of some earlier pioneers. He quit MIT AI Lab to dedicate his energy and effort to the cause, the cause of sharing, freedom and helping your neighbor, by his own words. Has a marginal gain, this movement also provide a solution for whom software cost of ownership his prohibitive.

Information is power, so they say, but without the tools for processing this information is lost as a dumb raw of meaningless data. And now is available to all (or almost). It isn't just free or open source software, it's SOCIAL SOFTWARE.

Euro 2008

Portugal qualified to Euro 2008 in Austria/Switzerland after a 0-0 draw with Finland.

Xaile

Here goes some Portuguese popular music for you. It goes by the name Xaile and you can see and listen them at their page in MySpace.

Colossus Strikes Back

It seems that World War II computer Colossus is cracking codes again.

Language Discovery

Let me tell you about what to me is the greatest human invention of all time: language. By language, i mean speech and alphabet. How does this capacity that enable us to communicate and persist knowledge among generations come to be?

Speech of course is the result of perfecting human vocalization and evolve from the discovery of pre-historic man of his inner capacity to emit and control sound.

Nobody knows when or how that happen but what can be said is that it was a longmaturation process until we reach the level which enable full communication and expression of abstract ideas.

Speech itself was a great step in human evolution but until we manage to code that speech for future memory it's value from the perspective of a persisting medium of communication is limited somewhat to oral tradition, so it's not adequate to mankind build upon past generations of endeavor.

What was lacking was a code, a symbolic or phonetic representation of our capacity to speech and once reached that our cognitive horizon would expand beyond the stars.

That's the main reason i assert language has the greatest human invention, because language is a pre-requisite to all other inventions and a necessary one. Civilization could not have emerged without it.

So, how do we reach that point? To talk about that we have to go back to the very beginning of historic time and even further.

Ancient Greece had a legend about which the alphabet was introduced in Europe by a Phoenician named kadmus; although the history must not necessarily be truth - Kadmus was a Greek name - it tell us about the importance of the Phoenicians to this story, but we are aheading our selfs, i come to that again in a moment.

The story of the alphabet can be accurately traced back to the beginning of civilization in the kingdoms of Egypt and Babylonia. Not that i pretend to imply that his story doesn't have roots in preceding times only that our state of
knowledge can go accurately only that far.

So, our story could have start as... In the beginning was the hieroglyphs. Hieroglyps are essentially a compound system of writing used by many ancient civilizations in different forms. It consists mainly of an ideographic system of representation associated sometimes with a phonetic and association one. Meaning that an icon or symbol could have a literal meaning has in a house picture to represent a house or a phonetic value to represent a consonant in the case of egyption writing or a syllable as other systems of writing, like the babylonian, did. The association method of representation mean that a symbol could have a non literal meaning has in the case of the use of an eagle to represent the values of persistence, liberty and freedom.

The Egyptians made use of iconographic symbols as a determinative way of help to clarify the meaning of some dubious word, meanwhile the babylonians drop it all together.

This result in a curiously conglomerate system of writing,
made up in part of symbols reminiscent of the crudest stages of
picture-writing, in part of symbols having the phonetic value of
syllables, and in part of true alphabetical letters. In a word,
this represents in itself the elements of the
various stages through which the art of writing has developed.
We must conceive that new features were from time to time added
to it, while the old features, curiously enough, sometimes were not given
up.

So our story must have started after all as... In the beginning was the picture, and the picture turn itself into an icon in symbolic (ideographic) writing. So from that we can really see that we can trace back the roots of the alphabet to the pre-historic cave man. When he learn to express himself in the paintings made in the walls of the caverns. And form that in the history roll of time we have the ideographic and phonetic systems, but that wasn't enough to reach the modern alphabet, what was steel lacking was brought to us by the Phoenician people.

Phoenicians were merchants and traders that rule over the mediterranian sea. Trough that merchant activity they reach and colonize many places including, it is believed, my hometown Lisbon. From and as a result of that they serve as messengers between different regions of the globe. One of them was ancient Greece, so when the Greeks developed their own version of the alphabet, the mother of all modern European ones, they derived it from the Phoenician.

So what was the innovation brought about by the Phoenicians in their alphabet? The use of consonants to express more than one syllable. You see, when i talk about the babylonian way of writing i told you that their system phonetically represents the use of syllables so that for each syllable was a unique symbol. That means that there was thousand of symbols to express every possible syllable in their native idiom. The same thing occurs even more frequently in the Chinese language, which is monosyllabic. The Chinese adopt a more clumsy expedient, supplying a different symbol for each of the meanings of a syllable; so that while the actual word-sounds of their speech are only a few hundreds in number, the characters of
their written language mount high into the thousands.

So the Phoenicians have the idea of abstract the use of syllables by consonants and were able to simplify so much the use of their alphabet that, with time, their version would replace all the old archaic ones and establish the standard for all future variations from whom the greek was the most well succeeded.

The Phoenician alphabet was so simplified that even vowels were excluded, so that the Greek alphabet was the first to employ the simultaneous use of vowels and consonants. From that we get latin and so on... and as they say the rest is history.

Carl Sagan on Hieroglyphs

Forward the video to 19m25s to see Carl Sagan explain Champollion quest to decipher hieroglyphs.

CHAMPOLLION

For many years people tried to understand the egyptian characters found everywhere in ancient Egypt, the hieroglyphs, but without much success.

But in 1799 took place a decisive fact that eventually would change all that. At that time Napolean was pursuing his Egypt campaign and one of his soldiers made a remarkable discovery, the Rosetta Stone.
This artifact would be the key to unlock a mystery with thousand years and reveal to the world the secrets of a civilization and a golden era.

The text crafted on the stone surface was the description of the coronation of Ptolemy at 196 BC, but what was remarkable was that besides egyptian native language the report was translated in two more, demotic and greek.

Greek was one of the languages known at that time by a particular linguist, one that had persuit the deciphering of egyptian language since he was a boy. His name was Champollion.

When Napolean came to Egypt he took with him many scientists to study the egyptian science and culture and to help revealing and exposing many precious artifacts.

One of them was Fourier. When he come back to France he took with him some of this minus artifacts that would capture the attention of a 11 years old boy that he take to his care, Champollion. This, by the time, strange artifacts would lead Champollion to devote his life to uncover the secrets hidden in them, specially those mysterious symbols and characters that nobody knew the meaning.

He came to be a skillful linguist and with the Rosetta Stone and another obelisk about Cleopatra he manage to discover all the egyptian vocabulary.

In 1828, he finally set foot in the land that induce such wonder in him by an expedition to the ancient city and temples of Karnak. What he and his companions saw overwhelmed them and produce a fascination of a lifetime. In that walls he was able to read and decipher the meaning of the messages printed many eras ago.

From that moment on the clouds that were blocking our understanding were lifted revealing the apogee of the egyptian civilization.


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Universal Mind

A beautiful song by The Doors

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Moonlight Drive, a poem by Jim Morrinson

Let's swim to the moon,
Let's climb through the tide
Penetrate the evening
That the city sleeps to hide
Let's swim out tonight, love
It's our turn to try
Parked beside the ocean
On our moonlight drive

Portuguese Culture

I warn you about some postings about Portugal: Here's one.

About

This is my blog, this is about me.

Here you'll find all the subjects that i'm interested including: science, computers, art, sport, etc.

Also, i am portuguese so you might expect to find here posts about portuguese culture broadly speaking.

I hope you'll enjoy this and find common interests.